I was intrigued when Jim Brossman announced his version 2.x of his snip manager on the Liberty Basic Conforums site recently. I have needed one of these for a long time, but have never gotten around to building one myself.

After downloading the snip manager and using it a while, I asked Jim if he would mind me sharing it, and doing a review. He graciously agreed.

I reviewed version 2.01 of snip manager, which I obtained from the Liberty Basic Downloads site (http://www.lbdownloads.com/files/viewtopic.php?t=12). The GUI took a little getting use to, but the snip manager proved to be well worth the time to learn. As suggested by Jim, I have tokenized my snip manager and added it as an add-on tool for the LB editor. It works very slick this way, as you can call it up at will from the menu.

I was a little confused coming into the snip manager, and did not immediately understand the GUI. When the program opens you are presented with a window sized white window that proclaims that this is Snip Manager. There is a simple menu that consists of three items: File, Snips and Help.

The help file is implemented as an RTF file that is opened in WordPad. I hoped the help file would lead me to the right choice to proceed, as it was not completely obvious to me from the menu choices. Reading through it, the help file explains how to add your own snips and categorize snips and even how to begin with a clean snip library. The obvious eluded me, so I just explored.

As it turns out the heart of the program is accessed from the Snips >> Edit Snip File menu option. I thought that this would just be simple file maintenance, but it turns out to be the UI for finding and using snips. Here is a screen shot:

In this window the current catalog of snips is displayed. Each of them can be categorized into one or more categories. Snip name (a 30 character field) is the name that will appear in the listbox. There is an Extra field that can contain a brief description of the snip. Clicking Display Code will bring up another window that will show the snippet and allow you to copy it into the clipboard. From there, it is easy to paste it into your editor.

The operation is slick and the program is fast and easy to use. I did not uncover any bugs, but would have some suggestions for future implementations. My main suggestion would be separating the edit/add functionality from the browse/use functionality. Having them combined introduces the potential for disaster to befall your snip library. I accidentally clicked the clear button and all the snips were gone! Wow! Click cancel allowed me to avoid disaster. It is not hard to delete or change the snips, which is both a bonus and a potential for problems.

I this having the browse functions implemented on the main form would make the program a little more intuitive, and introduce one less open window.

All in all, the program is solid and once the GUI is understood, easy to use. I would easily recommend it to anyone who is looking for a program for cataloging and managing a library of reusable code components. As an added bonus Jim has included 113 of his favorite snippets to get you going.

The entire snippet manager is available online (see the link above), or it can be extracted from this month's newsletter archive.

In Jim's words, here is the official introduction to Snip Manager: